Chapter 37 The Birth of Tragedy Chapter Twenty-Three

birth of tragedy Chapter Twenty-Three Whoever wishes to rigorously test whether he resembles a true aesthetic spectator, or belongs to the ranks of Socratic critics, need only ask himself how he feels when he appreciates the miracle of the stage performance: does he feel that his insistence on rigorous Is the historical sense of psychic causality insulted, does he kindly admit that these miracles are phenomena that are popular with children but alien to him, or can he gain some other experience from them?Because of this, he was able to measure how much of his ability to understand mythology.Myth is a concentrated picture of the world, and as an abbreviation of phenomenon, it cannot lack miracles.It is quite possible, however, that nearly everyone, under close inspection, always feels himself so corrupted by the historically critical spirit of modern culture that it is only academically, through indirect abstraction, that it is possible to believe that there may have been myths in the past.However, without myth, any culture will lose its healthy and natural creativity. It is the vision of myth that constrains all cultural movements and makes them a system.It is with the aid of myth that all imagination, all dream fantasies, are saved from aimless wandering.The image of the myth must be invisible to the naked eye, but the ubiquitous guardian spirit: under the protection of gods and ghosts, young hearts gradually grow; with the guidance of ghosts and gods, adults understand the meaning of their own survival and struggle; even the country It is admitted that there is no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical ground, which guarantees the connection between the state and religion, and proves that the state grows out of mythical ideas.

On the other hand, let us try to imagine abstract people, abstract education, abstract morality, abstract justice, and abstract country that are not guided by mythology; let us try to imagine how the artistic imagination that is not restricted by the mythology of its own country can imagine; Let us try to imagine a culture that has no fixed sacred birthplace, but is destined to exhaust all its potentialities and depend on all foreign cultures for a hard life-this is today's era. and the resulting consequences.Today, people who have lost mythology are always hungry, wandering in the past era, trying their best to explore and dig out some roots, even if they have to explore the most distant ancient times.The intense historical interest of our insatiable modern culture, our assimilation of the sums of countless other cultures, our insatiable thirst for knowledge;—what does all this signify, but not the loss of mythology, the loss of its homeland, the loss of Have you lost the mythical mother's arms?Let me ask you, isn't the frenzied excitement of this culture like a hungry man who is so poor that he doesn't choose what to eat, what else is it like?Such a voracious and insatiable culture, even when exposed to the most nourishing and beneficial things, often turns it into "history and criticism". Who is willing to give it more nutrition?

We must also be disastrously disappointed by the German national character if it has been trapped in this culture, or even assimilated with it, as we have been shocked to see in civilized France.For a long time the greatest virtue and the cause of great superiority of France has been the unity of people and culture, but we cannot help congratulating ourselves on seeing this today: our questionable culture has always been at odds with the nobility of our nation. Mind, nothing alike.On the contrary, all our hopes are pinned with infinite nostalgia on the realization that beneath the turbulent cultural life and the painfully struggling educational system lies a magnificent and energetic primordial force, which of course only exists in great times. Occasionally agitated vigorously, then fell back into sleep, dreaming of future awakening.Out of this abyss the German Reformation grew, and in its hymns the future melodies of German music were heard for the first time.The tone of Luther's hymn is so deep, brave, full of emotion, very gentle and beautiful, just like the first charming call of Dionysus from the dense jungle when the spring is approaching, the enthusiasm of Dionysus believers is overwhelming. The majestic procession answers this call with an echo that outweighs it, to whom we are grateful for German music, and we shall also be grateful for the rebirth of German mythology.

I thought, I must now lead my willing follower to a high place, and let him contemplate alone.There he has but three mates, and I shall encourage him to cry: We must follow our glorious guides, the ancient Greeks!In order to clarify our aesthetic knowledge, we borrowed from them beforehand two figures of the gods, each dominating a separate field of art.As they touch each other and complement each other, we get an idea from Greek tragedy.Because of the obvious lack of these two original artistic impulses, the collapse of Greek tragedy seems inevitable. The decline and deterioration of Greek national character echoes the collapse of tragedy, which arouses our serious reflection. : Art and the people, myths and customs, tragedy and the country, must be closely connected at the same root.The collapse of tragedy is at the same time the collapse of myth.Involuntarily, before the collapse, the Greeks had to connect at once all their experiences to their mythology; indeed, it was only through this connection that they could understand the past; It is subspecie aeterni (belonging to the category of eternity), which is, in a sense, timeless.Yet the state, and even art, throw themselves into this timeless torrent in order to relieve the burdens and aspirations of the present and to take a rest.Even a people, let alone a man, is worth only so much in proportion to the imprint it can imprint upon its own experience; It shows its unconscious inner belief in the relativity of time, the true meaning of life, and the philosophy of life.When a people begins to know itself historically and destroys the mythical citadels around it, the opposite happens: this often brings with it a decidedly secular tendency to turn away from the unconscious philosophies of past life and its all moral conclusions.Greek art, and especially Greek tragedy, prevented the destruction of myth in the first place; so both must be destroyed in order to leave the native land and live freely in the desert of thought, custom, and action.Even then, this impulse to detachment strives to create for itself a cult, even an enfeebled one: that is scientific Socratism striving for survival; but, in its lower stages, this impulse can only leads to ardent exploration, and gradually disappears in the hell of myths and superstitions accumulated here and there: in the center of which the Greek sits, lingering, until he knows, like Griculus, that with Greek optimism and Greek carefreeness to disguise one's fanaticism, or to completely anesthetize one's self with some gloomy oriental superstition.

We are today astonishingly near to this situation, since Alessandrian-Roman antiquity was finally revived in the fifteenth century after an inexplicably long hiatus.The same vigorous thirst for knowledge, the same insatiable joy of invention, the same sharp worldly inclinations, have reached their peak; add a wandering homeless, a greed to squeeze into other people's feasts, a kind of love for the present. The frivolous admiration of man, or the insensitive alienation of the present, of all things sub specie saeculi (belonging to the secular sphere);—these omens suggest the same defect at the heart of this culture, the destruction of mythology.It seems impossible to transplant a foreign myth, with continued success, without irreparably harming the tree; and the tree may sometimes be quite strong enough, by a bleak struggle, to eliminate all alien elements again, but in the usual cases , it must be weak and weak, or its roots will wither and its leaves will flourish.We place so much value on the pure and robust core of German national character that we dare to expect it to exclude those alien elements which have been forced into it;Many, perhaps, believe that the struggle of the German spirit must begin by excluding Rome; and they see, therefore, in the victories and bloody glory of the latest war, a little superficial preparation and encouragement for such a struggle; In passion, an inner requirement must be found in order to remain worthy of the noble opponents of this path, Luther and our great artists and poets.But do not think that it is possible to take part in this struggle without our domestic gods, without a mythical homeland, without the need to "restore" all of Germany's heritage.If the German shrinks, and looks about him, for a guide to lead him back to his long-lost homeland, where he no longer knows the way; Sound, it is soaring in the sky, willing to show him the future.